Organic Gardening with Kids: Planting

Planting Our Organic Garden

We are growing an organic garden this year with some help from The Home Depot – who decided to sponsor a series on organic gardening on my blog! It’s a lot of fun to have a gardening budget! We have been practicing organic gardening for the past few years, but this series is giving me a chance to get more serious about it. There are some really great ideas on the Garden Club board on Pinterest, and I love that I can get expert advice through the Garden Club Community Forum!

Mike watched the kids so I could take as much time as I wanted browsing the options at The Home Depot. Check out their all of their organic seed options! We are going to try growing organic rainbow carrots, two different kinds of sugar snap peas, and organic sunflowers from seed. The other plants I picked up as baby plants, which will help us have food we can eat a little bit sooner, so long as we don’t get an unexpected cold snap. The Bonnie Plants that I bought came in completely biodegradable, organic pots – so I could plant the pot right inside of my garden!

Every year we plant a tomato plant in this pot and then the kids build a fairy village around the base. I’m excited to see what the kids do with it this year. Gardens are wonderful for children’s imaginations, as well as fantastic educational tools!

We loosened up the soil that was left over in our planter boxes from last year, and added in compost from the fall. In previous years, I have only grown plants from seed – I’m curious to see how the seedlings fare! Besides the seeds, we planted rosemary, chocolate mint, basil, tomatoes, city salad, more sugar snap peas (my favorite food in the whole wide world), Swiss chard, and marigolds (recommended by Jen as a way of keeping pests away – and very pretty!) I skipped on squash and zucchini – we have planted those in the past, and they take up a lot of space, plus I’m the only one who really wants to eat them. I also skipped watermelon, because we tried that last year and they weren’t really ready for picking when the first frost came, so we had to eat less-than-ideally-ripe watermelon.

I have wire grids to add to the garden this weekend. We will wind the plants around the grids to encourage them to grow as tall as possible, so that we can then have as many tomatoes and peas as possible!

Do you do organic vegetable gardening? Do you have any wisdom to share with me? The things that have helped me the most so far are having a compost bin (someday I want to upgrade to a rotating one), planting in a raised bed to minimize weeds and pests, and paying attention to what plants grow best in my climate. Do you have any organic gardening tips?

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Reader Interactions

Comments

We (I say we but it’s really my husband who manages the garden!) moved our garden this year in hopes of getting more sunlight for it. He and the kids have been busy plating and watering for the last few weeks now. I love to see the kids so excited about it!

I like the idea of wire grids to encourage growth! I’ve been thinking about using trellising for squashes, but the trellis would have to be pretty strong. I noticed as well that you had a criss-cross on one of your boxes – will you cover it with some sort of animal-proof mesh to prevent birds and four-legged beasts from eating your crop?

The criss-cross supports a plastic greenhouse cover, but I think I could use it with some sort of mesh, too. And maybe I need to! We have a resident groundhog who has always left my garden alone. This year I planted chard and city salad, and I thought he might bother those. He did today – AND he ate ALL of my pea plants, which really surprised me, because I have planted them every year and he has never touched them before! Time to replant and find some animal proofing solutions!

That should definitely be long enough to plant something! Starting with seeds it can take a couple weeks to get anything going, but if start with a baby plant it takes a lot less time. If you go to your local garden center they will have the plants labeled with how long they take to grow. There is a lot of variation – I have seen tomato plants that take anywhere from 50-95 days!

It’s great to see you gardening as well – we’re gardening organically but it’s a hard slog at the moment we have a Horse Tail problem and they are taking over the vegetable patches now the weather is warming up.

No words of wisdom but I look forward to following along with you. I would love to try organic gardening and sugar snap peas are also a favorite of mine! Did you like the square foot gardening book – I’d love to try that one day.